Schedule set for appeals of FCC local pole ownership preemption

17 January 2019 by Steve Blum
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Riverside pole mount

The federal appeals court in San Francisco set 5 April 2019 as the filing date for opening briefs in the nine challenges it’s received, so far, to the Federal Communications Commission’s September order preempting municipal ownership of streetlight poles and other potential wireless assets in the public right of way.

The FCC will have a month to respond, then the challengers will have three weeks to file a final rebuttal. So it’ll be the end of May before all the opening arguments are on the table. After that, it could be a year or more before the process is complete and the San Francisco judges issue a decision.

Six of those challenges were filed by cities, counties and their associations that contend that the FCC went beyond the authority it was granted by congress, if not beyond the bounds of the federal constitution. The other three were submitted by mobile carriers who thought they should have been given even more freebies by the FCC.

Those cases were transferred to the San Francisco-based ninth circuit by the tenth circuit court of appeals in Denver, which agreed with arguments made by the City of San Jose and other local agencies that the FCC’s September wireless preemption order and its August wireline preemption order were, for legal purposes, two halves of the same decision.

There’s still a lot of housekeeping work to be done, though, before substantive arguments can begin. Four other challenges – one by AT&T and three by municipal challengers – are lodged in the federal appeals court based in Washington, D.C. Presumably those will be transferred to San Francisco, too, and then consolidated with all the others – September wireless order and August wireline order alike.

In the meantime, the FCC wireless order is in effect. At least to the extent that it has effect, which is not as much as mobile carriers would like cities to believe.